DIY Car camping kitchen box for SUV or Minivan - easy setup, organization ideas and hacks

Hi everyone, it's summer and it got me thinking about road trips again and I wanted to see if I could take my SUV and all the

camping

gear we have and create a little camp

kitchen

and organizer in the back, so this That's what I prepared. So I've been researching camp

kitchen

boxes and little camper van things for years and had a whole album of things that I thought were pretty cute. The nomad is new. It's on kickstarter. I think one starts at a thousand, but... Some of these best ones, like the folding

camping

box and the ego nest, cost around three thousand dollars just for the cabinets and then you still have to buy the refrigerator, so it seemed a little crazy to me, but I thought there were some

ideas

really creative here. that I wanted to borrow for my

setup

and the criteria I followed for this was that there was no need to sleep in the car, but I wanted to have a really nice kitchen with good storage space, a sink, a refrigerator, a freezer, lots of storage space. preparation, uh a. sink whatever, everything you would really need in a really well organized and well thought out system and I didn't want to spend a lot of money or a lot of time, so the design I chose after a lot of sketches and prototypes is actually super simple, everything that you need is a 4x8 sheet of Baltic birch.

I got the 12 mil size, which is three quarters of an inch, a single eight foot, two by four for the legs and two by three for the stringers, and then this. perforated rail that we can use for our pull-out drawer and for

organization

I chose a pre-made filing cabinet, that's right, I didn't want to build anything so everything here is semi-homemade and I wanted good refrigeration, so this refrigerator-freezer is really great , so this is a super efficient plug-in compressor refrigerator-freezer, so once I got those two things, I started doing a bunch of prototypes in the car, resting things on blocks trying to get an idea of ​​what would work incidentally.

The basketballs are the perfect height for what I was looking for and this is the end result so we have these removable bins on the bottom there are two and they are four feet long and 20 inches wide and these are our big mats for sleeping. I'm going to take them out and the nice thing here is that everything is packed but still accessible so we can get into all three drawers and still have our tent on the right side with two extra sleeping pads so if we stop and you want to have lunch quick, the refrigerator is on a nice slider, just pull it out, you can grab some cold ice, maybe a popsicle, grab your sandwiches and have a prep surface up there, so it's really nice and accessible, super

easy

, Very low tech and slider definitely make it really

easy

to get every last inch of usable space.

The rear of the car is a bit of an odd shape, so having a slider allows you to get the most out of everything and that just fits this top board. here and right next to it is where I chose to install the filing cabinet that will be used to organize all my camping gear, so the cooking utensils, the olive oil, the spices, the pots and pans, the dishes, all that good stuff, and I chose the file cabinet because it gives me full extension drawers. It was only a hundred dollars and it's just perfect. If I had to build all this out of wood, it would have taken me forever and you can see I can pull out my camp stove, my pots and pans.

I can still access the sink so even in a really compact space I still have a very functional

setup

here so let's take out the other sleeping pads and the tent so we can show you some of the other features here so this is it what you see. like from the side and you'll notice that it's set back here and the reason is because the back of the car is quite tilted and again we always have these bins underneath. I'm going to have a container that will hold all my camping stuff. in it there are fire starters, you know, random things like that and the container on the left that I'm going to use for all my dry goods, so I'll have pasta in there and all that good stuff and I think we'll even have a ton of space for some packing cubes so this is where things get a little more interesting so what I did was I created a second shelf directly underneath and if I slide it out I have a lot of counter space and It's also very, very stable. because it's caught on that metal rail that you saw earlier and it's very strong and what I did was I cut a piece of wood here for my sink and this is a continuous cut that I made on a jigsaw and that allows it to sit.

It's really nice and flush so I can use it as a work surface if I want or I can take it out and drop my sink in so the way it attaches is there's four pieces of metal in the corners and stuff. little stand and that makes it really very stable there is no way for it to wobble and when you take it out what I have is this foldable silicone sink and the funny thing is I actually think this is the same sink that is used on the ego . nest, which is three thousand dollars and it's super simple, it was like 20 dollars on Amazon, so you can choose how deep you want it to be, it has a drain at the bottom, so all I have to do is take out that little Foot support. the way and then I can put this right in and so it's a nice tight fit and to go with my sink I obviously need a faucet and instead of making a really complicated 12 volt system or a foot pump or something like that.

I found this on Amazon which is pretty interesting, this is a refillable faucet and it's designed to function as a five gallon pole and spring bottle so what I did was modify it slightly with a roll of duct tape and some magnets and I have a nice case for the tube so it's a little bit sturdier but it's super simple so this thing is rechargeable you just plug it in it has a battery inside and now it's magnetic so I can put it anywhere want and it's I'm not going anywhere so what I did was I put a little disk on the counter and that disk is the same one that you would use on your cell phone as a magnetic holder and I chose it because it's the thinnest, cheapest and faster.

There's a way to get something magnetic to stick to this thing and it's really cool to have running water like this so I can use this sink to wash dishes or wash vegetables and fruits and at the bottom of the sink there's a drain, this drain It is not hooked. up to any type of pipe, so the idea would be that you could throw this directly if the place you're standing is a good place for it or you could just take the whole container, pick it up and throw it somewhere where it's allowed, eh, but I know the drain is fine, it doesn't seem to be leaking at all and this shows you what the sink looks like when you collapse it, you basically push one side and then the next you shake it, maybe wash it a little and then I have a little cubby in my car where I can slide this in to store it safely and the third and final part of my water system is fresh water storage so for this I chose to use water bricks so I already had an eight pack of these things and If you're not familiar, they're a bit like Legos, they're designed to fit together and each one holds three and a half gallons, so with two I have a total of seven gallons of fresh water on board, but I can always add as many as I like. possible. whatever you want as long as I have room in my car and the water bricks are connected to the faucet with food grade silicone tubes and I noticed that the silicone tubes were a little sticky and collected dirt so I ended up using this fiber plastic woven on the outside which makes it feel a lot stronger so I'm not going to drill it and in the end to keep it clean I used some heat shrink and that connects to a brass l that goes through the lid and you can see inside . what the tube looks like by itself and there's a little stretch of tube that goes to the bottom of the water brick and the cool thing about water bricks, if you're not familiar, is that they're like Legos, so there's like a man and part feminine and they nest together so you can stack them, uh, you can put them next to each other, they're very flexible and that's all I'm doing here, I'm just going to put them in the car in the most efficient way. and putting them together, I put on little hairy feet.

There are a lot of hairy feet in this project to make sure I don't scratch the top, so I think this whole system is super simple and works great. There is one downside with this particular faucet and the faucet is designed to pull up and it doesn't work well if it's below the water block so one thing I have to be very careful with is making sure it's always above the water block. water line so it doesn't drip like that. Alright, let's take a look at the work surface so I can fully access these three drawers, as well as the refrigerator and freezer, so if I'm preparing a meal I can wash things in the sink. my cutting boards, I can have my ingredients on this counter and still have a lot of work surface and I think that's really the main thing I wanted to do here is have everything organized and so even if it's full, you can get to things quickly. and I wanted to avoid that huge container of random kitchen items, it is very difficult to find what you need when you are camping and in this case everything can be organized very clearly, so looking at the first drawer of this cabinet, this is the great one and here I can put my entire set of camping pots and pans and what I did was I bought these little magnetic spice racks so these things are great and since this file cabinet is made of metal I can stick it on the back Now you'll notice that there's a little magnet inside and I did that to overload them and give them a little bit more strength and you know we can do things like have big bottles.

In this case, I could be using this for soap and so what? I also have some magnets on the bottom so I can stick it all the way down, but this is a great cabinet for anything tall so I can keep my olive oil in here. I can have my sprays here and the fresh. The thing about this now, if I put magnets on it, it will stay when I put it down and that's the general idea with this bottom drawer, I can put a lot of really functional bulky things in it. The middle drawer has a silver organizer, so in this case I only have forks, but here I'm going to have real cutlery, my knives, my measuring cups and spoons, which are actually even important when you're making instant meals, you know, anything you might need, tweezers and then the top drawer. can be used for, you know, I can put plates in these bowls.

Can I have my lighters, uh, ziploc bags, what do you have? So you know that almost anything you need for cooking can be organized very well in these three drawers and best of all. There's a lock, so when I'm driving down the road I can close all three drawers and know they're not going anywhere. I noticed that when I was parked on slightly uneven ground the drawers would open on their own so I added some magnets inside the drawers and that keeps them secure at times when I don't want them to be locked, so the way It is attached to the base is quite interesting.

There were four threaded inserts that were designed to accept the wheels and so on. In three or four trips to the hardware store I discovered the exact metric bolt I needed and what I do is run those threaded inserts into t-nuts under the plywood, that's how I can keep this very secure when I'm on the road it doesn't move at all, so that's an example of what that full setup looks like, so we can slide it back in and you can see how it works and at all times I still have access to these drawers, so let's go.

Take the stove out and see how it works, so we have a Coleman dual propane stove, but for this build I decided I didn't really want to deal with that because honestly, most of the time I only use one. The burner and these butane stoves are good because I think they burn a little cleaner, but more importantly they are much easier to use. You don't have to go plug and unplug one of those one-pound propane tanks. a built in butane tank inside the unit so to light it is much more like using your stove at home you just push down on a lever to activate the tank turn the knob and it will start and I think these are really clean burning compared to My Coleman stove this one is 12,000 BTU and I think my Coleman stove is 10,000 per burner so this one actually puts out a little more heat.

You probably see them at hotel omelet stations and things like that because they're really nice and easy. to control precisely and what I have is a bugaboo gsi camper set. It's got a two and three liter pot, a frying pan, four plates, four cups and all this other good stuff in a really small form factor, so it's really cool. to camp in a stylefamily drive is definitely not country camping but I think this has really served us well over the years and is definitely highly recommended and I'm looking forward to doing some cooking in this new kitchen so now that we have Let's take a look at that, let's take a look inside the car and see how much room there is for other things, so you can see I have one of these Rei Siesta camping bags here, so I think I can fit two sleeping bags in there and if you put the seat down you can see the water bricks and under the sleeping bag is the electrical system so in this case i am using my trusty target zero yeti 1000 as a power plant and that unit is excellent it will do a perfect job for Turning this refrigerator on in my first tests, you can easily power it for about a day and a half with one side as a freezer and the other as a refrigerator, and there are plenty of little nooks and crannies that you can see.

I can squeeze the stove here next. to the water bricks and on the other side I can fit some sleeping bags So that's basically the space I have here, there's not a ton and there are three different things connected to the yeti, so the first one is this input that comes from the charger 12 volt for the car and then the DC output goes to the refrigerator and then this last thing on the mppt is where I'm going to connect my solar panels and the solar panels are here on the top and these are the tp foldable solar panels that I reviewed earlier and the amazing thing is Right now I have 180 watts of solar, it's incredibly thin, really cool and flexible so I can fit them right on the roof to take advantage of that last inch and you can see how thin these things are, I mean , they're basically not there, so if I were to have a typical glass panel, there's no way I could fit it, so if you unfold one of these, you can see what they look like, so my plan with these is just connect them. and maybe even leave them on top of the ceiling or at an angle on the floor so if we take out the sink we can see where the Goal Zero charger plugs in, so we have a 12 volt port here and that's what I'm plugging this into. 12 volt charger for the lithium yeti so you need this special cable here because lithium batteries will actually draw too much current from your battery and cause problems so the rest of the cables are here in the bay and essentially what I have is this two eight millimeter combiner cable from Anderson and that will connect to the extension cable that will run the yeti and then the two eight millimeter cables that connect to the tp solar panels will connect to them, so It's a pretty simple system for solar energy. the wiring is nice and neat and that should keep the yeti fully charged and the best thing about these compressor coolers is that they use a very small amount of power so when you plug this in at most it uses 55 watts and the compressor turns on. and off so you know this thing really draws power but one thing I learned the hard way with yeti lithiums is that the 12 volt port on the front is unregulated what that means is the voltage can drop very, very low, so even if I put the battery protection on its lowest setting in the refrigerator, it will turn off around 60 percent, so unfortunately you have to buy this regulated cable that uses the power post connectors from Anderson.

It's kind of unfortunate, I hope Goal Zero fixes this well, so that's the electricity. system is fine, so if you've been there that long you might be interested in how this is built in a little more detail, so we'll cover that now. Basically this is just a sheet of 4x8 plywood cut in half and then For the legs I just took two by fours and cut them to size and you can see there are three two by four legs per side and between them horizontally I cut a piece of two by three and just screwed that L channel on. and below here you can see a couple of things: these are the T nuts that we used to screw the refrigerator down and you'll notice that I used a generous amount of those little dots blurred and that's to prevent the shelf underneath from getting scratched and the same connection is used right next to it for the file cabinet so these are larger t-nuts and larger bolts, they're metric but it's the same principle and The reason we use t-nuts and glue them together is we want to make sure we're actually bolting these things together so they don't break in the event of an accident, so this channel is really simple.

I simply screwed it onto the legs and added some felt tape to the top. so it has kind of a smooth surface for this to move and here's a detail showing the pull. The pull is actually a random piece of tape I had and I just used a piece of metal here to screw it on and it shows. the bottom of the sink so these are the little metal pieces, just random pieces of metal I had lying around, I screwed them into the corners and another random piece of metal was used to create the little bracket to give it extra stability .

These are T nuts on the legs that are used to attach heavy duty D rings and I am going to use these D rings to ratchet this to some connection points near the rear hatch of my mazda and the same thing will happen on the front uh where the back seat is so in the back seat there's a very sturdy place where you can bolt on a child safety seat so I'm just going to take a ratchet strap and run it through that and connect it where necessary to these U bolts that I've connected inside the legs on the back, that's basically how all of this is going to connect to the car.

I'm hoping this will be a pretty secure thing once I get everything snug and tight and that's it. Simply put, this is actually very basic. Another cool thing is that there are these little rechargeable LED lights that are motion lights and I found that I could actually attach them to the struts magnetically and they would fit into the space so I could leave them on. and attach and just open and close the doors and if it was night they turned on automatically, so it was great, very low tech, very super simple, very cheap, so speaking of cheap, how much did all this cost?

Well, I think the wood and the screws. and the things were less than a hundred dollars, the file cabinet I think was 129. um, the most expensive thing is the refrigerator, which was 375 dollars, the slide I think was 175 and you know all the various things that I need to get, like the organizers of drawers. but I would say that in total this probably only costs between seven and eight hundred dollars, which is pretty cheap in terms of effort level. I put this together in two or three days, right at night after work, so it's pretty easy and the tools I had on hand were just a small circular saw, a jigsaw and a cordless drill, so you know , this is the kind of thing that anyone could tackle and yeah, I mean, I don't know if any of these

ideas

will be valid.

Helpful for you guys, but I thought I'd share what I discovered and what seemed to work for me, so thanks for watching, I really appreciate it and happy camping, thanks everyone.